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'Of course you know why I'm writing': War letter from 1917 a tale of friendship and sacrifice

In this April 7, 2017 file photo, Canadian soldiers stand in a line in front of a black boot with a red poppy, representing the fallen, at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in Givenchy-en-Gohelle, France.Photo: Virginia Mayo

Nick Faris

Published: February 21, 2019 - 7:11 PM

In early May 1917, Earl Sorel, a young teamster from Manitoba, was laid up in a British hospital a short ferry ride across the River Mersey from Liverpool when he got his hands on a pencil and a piece of paper, noted his temporary address in textbook cursive at the top right corner of the page and began to craft a letter home to a teenaged girl named Pauline Rochford.

“Of course you know why I am writing to you,” he wrote.

For the 20 years that preceded his hospitalization, Sorel had moved through life in lockstep with Pauline’s older brother, Gordon. The two of them grew up a few blocks apart in Selkirk, a city north of Winnipeg along the Red River. When Earl and Gordon enrolled for war in Winnipeg on Aug. 2, 1915, the same officer, a J.B. Mitchell, signed their attestation papers. They sailed from Halifax to Liverpool the following May, infantrymen earmarked to serve together in Canada’s 78th Battalion.

The men of the 78th, a detail of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, fought in the Battle of the Somme soon after they travelled from England to France, and later at Passchendaele in late 1917. In the interim they were among the soldiers who stormed the Germans at Vimy Ridge.

Amanda Kehler, the owner of the Prairie Pickers Cafe antique shop in Steinbach, Man., found in a box of old papers this letter Canadian soldier Earl Sorel wrote from a British hospital in May 1917 to the sister of his dead best friend, Gordon Rochford.

At 5:30 a.m. on Easter Monday of that year, Earl Sorel jumped out of a trench in the dark and trotted forward for a kilometre in blowing snow, at which point he heard a loud bang.

“I felt a sharp burn in my back and left arm,” he wrote to Pauline. “The next thing I remember was Gordon pulling me in a shell hole, and he said, ‘stay there, old boy, and someone will help you.’

“That was the last I saw of poor Gordon.”

Gordon Rochford, 22, “died a hero, along with many others that same day,” Sorel said he learned shortly before he wrote to Pauline. He was left to envelope the letter and to mail it overseas.

Canadian soldier Gordon Rochford saved his best friend Earl Sorel’s life at Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917, before dying in battle later that day.

Little more than a century later, somebody filled a wooden box with old teaching certificates, blank telegram forms and editions of newspapers from 1923. They brought the box to a flea market in Steinbach, Man., southeast of Winnipeg and the Red River, and sold it for a dollar.

Sorel’s letter was somewhere inside that box, and his solemn tribute to Rochford’s valorous last minutes attracted attention in Manitoba recently when the owner of a Steinbach antique shop, Amanda Kehler, was surprised to find it among the heap of papers she and her husband Calvin had just acquired.

“It moved me greatly,” Kehler said.

Vimy Ridge, where all four divisions of the Canadian Corps first banded together in battle, is hailed as this country’s greatest military triumph — a fable that celebrates how Canada became a nation even as it mourns that achievement’s great cost. The Canadian dead and wounded at the end of the fight totalled 10,602, including two best friends from Selkirk.

“We must believe it: never again,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at Vimy on April 9, 2017, 100 years after the battle opened.

In this April 9, 2017 file photo, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) and his wife Sophie Gregoire (centre) visit the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.

Information about the Grenadiers’ contributions at Vimy and to the war effort more generally is difficult to find today, largely because the regiment lives on in name only; it has no manpower and, therefore, no one assigned to chronicle its history.

Records do show how the 78th Battalion’s path through the war — from the Somme, Vimy and Passchendaele on through to the Hundred Days Offensive — would have mirrored that of so many other Canadian troops.

“It’s just that grinding frontal assault through the mud,” said Ron Burch, the manager of a museum dedicated to the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, another infantry regiment that attained distinction in the war.

“When the whistle blasts out of the trenches, you go into what became industrialized killing with the advent of machine guns.”

Like Sorel and Rochford, most of the First World War-era Grenadiers were Manitobans, Burch said, though others came from Northern Ontario, Vancouver and northern U.S. states from Washington through Minnesota. The only quadruple amputee who survived the war served in the 78th Battalion: Ethelbert “Curley” Christian, a Pennsylvanian who enlisted at Selkirk in 1915 and was gravely wounded at Vimy.

“Once you go through the baptism of fire, it’s really more the cohesive unit that gets formed,” Burch said. “Where you’re from is less important than your ability to keep you and your buddies alive.”

Amanda and Calvin Kehler don’t intend to sell Sorel’s letter at their antique shop, the Prairie Pickers Café. Instead they’re working to have it delivered to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial’s visitor education centre, hoping it can be installed there as a lasting record, Amanda said, of Sorel and Rochford’s “story of friendship and sacrifice.”

Through the wave of publicity her discovery of the letter engendered, Amanda made touch in recent days with four of the men’s descendants: Rochford’s great-niece, Sorel’s great-niece and two great-nephews. Each of them told her they’d prefer to stay anonymous, she said, and all agree the letter should go to a museum.

For now Sorel’s note sits in the Kehlers’ safety deposit box. Its author, after his discharge from the army in 1919, moved home to Selkirk and then to Winnipeg with his mother, Margaret. He met a woman named Mabel and married her in 1935. He died childless in 1969.

Rochford’s personnel record from the war catalogues his service from enlistment through to his tragic end. “Killed in action,” a file card reads, on April 9, 1917. Eight days later he was awarded a medal for bravery.

“Well, dear friend, I can’t say any more. My hand is very shaky,” Sorel wrote to Pauline Rochford a couple of weeks later, admitting his penmanship was tougher to understand as he reached his conclusion.